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Vol XXI, No 1 (2013) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2013.593

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Review Essay Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

Kenneth Noe

Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la philosophie

française et de langue française, Vol XXI, No 1 (2013) pp. 161-172

Vol XXI, No 1 (2013)

ISSN 1936-6280 (print)

ISSN 2155-1162 (online)

DOI 10.5195/jffp.2013.593 www.jffp.org


Vol XXI, No 1 (2013) | www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2013.593

Review Essay Daniel W. Smith, Essays on Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012)

Kenneth Noe Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

It would take little argument to show that Daniel W. Smith’s work on the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-‐‑1995) is owed a debt by English-‐‑speaking readers of Deleuze that is difficult to overstate. Over the past 15 years, Professor Smith has not only translated some of the most important works by the French thinker – among them Essays Critical and Clinical (with Michael Greco, 1997),1 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (2003),2 and Deleuze’s early 1963 essay “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics”3 – but has also bequeathed to a new generation of Deleuze readership a penetrating and remarkably lucid interpretation of Deleuze’s philosophical system, an interpretation that is at once sensitive to Deleuze’s unique conceptual development, as well as his intimate relationship with the history of philosophy. Until recently, Professor Smith’s work has been dispersed throughout a multitude of various philosophical venues, from journal articles and book chapters to introductory essays accompanying his Deleuze translations. Essays on Deleuze finally gathers this work together in a single volume,4 presenting these essays along a more unified trajectory that both records Smith’s significant contribution to Deleuze studies while also laying foundations for new avenues of research.

The essays are organized into four main headings, each focusing on a particular aspect of Deleuze’s philosophy: Deleuze and the History of Philosophy, Deleuze’s Philosophical System (which contains a new essay entitled “On the Becoming of Concepts”), Five Deleuzian Concepts (Desire, Life, Sensation, The New, and The Open, which contains a second new essay entitled “The Idea of the Open: Bergson’s Theses on Movement”), and Deleuze and Contemporary Philosophy, where Deleuze’s philosophy is examined in relation to five contemporary figures: Derrida, Badiou, Lacan, Klossowski, and the political philosophy of Paul Patton. The ample wealth of material presented over the course of these 20 essays (466 pp.) is vastly impossible to represent adequately in this review, so in what follows I’d like to focus on what I take to be one of Smith’s most original and characteristic approaches for the framing of Deleuze’s overall philosophical project, namely, the important ways in which Deleuze’s philosophy is a direct response to Kant and post-‐‑Kantian critical philosophy.5 Specifically, Smith’s work clearly identifies the ways in which Deleuze develops the resources in Kant’s philosophy for posing the problem of the new, or more precisely still,

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Vol XXI, No 1 (2013) | http://www.jffp.org | DOI 10.5195/jffp.2013.593

the transcendental conditions of the richness of experiential novelty. While the Kantian inheritance of this theme appears in just about every essay in the collection, I will concentrate on a small cluster of essays that perhaps most thoroughly develop it: Essay 4 (“Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-‐‑Kantian Tradition”), essay 5 (“Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real”), essay 6 (“Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality”), essay 7 (“Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas”), essay 8 (“On the Becoming of Concepts,” previously unpublished), and essay 9 (“The Place of Ethics in Deleuze’s Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence”).

“Deleuze, Hegel, and the Post-‐‑Kantian Tradition” provides a short defense of the view that Deleuze is much more the dialectical thinker than is often assumed. While the context which initiated Deleuze’s philosophical development occasioned a sustained polemic against Hegel – the presumed doorway through which all subsequent philosophy must pass – Smith argues that it is not dialectics as such that are the object of Deleuze’s enmity; it is rather a dialectics framed by negation and contradiction (“Hegelianism”), which Deleuze views as a reduction of real experience to subsumptive structures that preclude novelty. As Smith suggests, the polemics against Hegel are more properly understood in the context of Deleuze’s more profound re-‐‑imagining of the trajectory of the post-‐‑Kantian tradition, and should therefore be understood in light of the broader scope which forms the intellectual basis for Difference and Repetition,6 the fourth chapter of which develops Deleuze’s own theory of a dialectic of difference based on a complex theory of “differential” Ideas.

“Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas” bridges this historical theme with its more properly conceptual register by providing a reading of Deleuze’s genetic and differential theory of Ideas (on which his concept of dialectics is based). Smith’s approach in this essay is to place Deleuze directly in line with Kant in order to show how Deleuze’s theory is crucially developed out of the theory of Ideas the former constructs in his three critiques, arguing for Deleuze’s heavy indebtedness not only to Salomon Maimon’s theory of “differentials of experience” – which historically presents the first substantial response to Kant’s intuition-‐‑concept dualism – but also to Kant’s own third Critique. In the latter, the Ideas of reason (as “aesthetic ideas”) go far beyond their merely regulative role assigned in the first Critique, and become the key elements in a genetic account of the imagination’s freedom from the determinate legislation of the understanding. Smith argues that when Deleuze finally turns back to Leibniz for resources for his own theory of Ideas, he does so in a decidedly post-‐‑Kantian fashion, since Deleuze’s central problem, as it was for Maimon, concerns the overcoming of the Kantian duality between sensibility and conceptual understanding: either concepts are sensible (as in Locke) or sense experience is ultimately intelligible (as in Leibniz). Following Maimon, Deleuze will choose the latter path, developing a theory of immanent Ideas

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as multiplicities that develop through a complex non-‐‑teleological temporality. Deleuzian Ideas are therefore not essences (in the simplistic sense of self-‐‑identical universals), but are rather more like generative processes (events, becomings) that effect internal variations within real experience.7 Tempered by the critical lead of both Maimon as well as Kant’s third Critique, Deleuze thus appropriates from Leibniz a theory of the Idea as an object of a purely immanent determination: While an Idea is completely undetermined, it is in principle determinable in the differential elements of experience,8 which when actualized produces a singularity, a multiplicity that is unique, different, and new. This “structure” of Ideas thereby gives them a creative power, a genuine productive potentiality that serves as a necessary condition for the richness of intensive real experience, our closest approximation to the real.

Continuing this theme, “Logic and Existence: Deleuze on the Conditions of the Real” is a refreshing essay that camps on a variation of this problem, which lies at the very heart of Deleuze’s project: namely, how it is that philosophy might leave the sphere of the merely possible in order to think the real, that is, to think the aesthetic complexity of actual existence. Adopting a cinematographic metaphor, Smith takes the reader (or perhaps the “viewer”) through a three-‐‑part narrative in which the relationship between logic and existence is framed by three philosophical contexts: Leibniz, Hegel, and the existentialists. In brief, scene one: Leibniz, adopting the principle of identity, argues that existence can be thought with a theory of complete concepts (“truth belongs to analytic propositions”), extending the principle of identity into the infinite richness of concrete particularity. Consequently, the logical predicates of complete concepts not only include properties, attributes, and other substantial determinations, but also include events and spatio-‐‑temporal determinations – e.g., the event “crossing the Rubicon” is no longer a merely contingent attribute, but rather a necessary part of the complete concept of “Caesar.” Such is the principle of identity in Leibniz’s hands: A thing is what it is, all the way down to its specified singularity, because a complete concept determines it to be so in principle. Next, scene two: the post-‐‑Kantian tradition culminates in Hegel, who adopts the principle of non-‐‑contradiction in order to think existence. Famously, the Hegelian logic thinks existence as the process of an unraveling and resolution of contradictions present in the experience of consciousness. But as Smith observes, when Hegel says that things do not contradict themselves, he is ultimately saying something about things, i.e., something about the nature of existence itself rather than mere abstract logical principles – and, more deeply, about the ways in which things are born and develop (79). Thus on the Hegelian view it is the principle of non-‐‑contradiction that lies at the heart of existence. Finally, scene three: the existentialist “either...or.” The existentialist describes existence as the source of a choice or decision, or the mode of the alternative rather than the negative, in Smith’s words (80). In existentialism, then, the law of excluded

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middle lies at the heart of being (Hamlet’s “to be or not to be / that is the question”). To exist is to be in question, as the source of a decision, and to think – or to think in this way rather than that way – is a choice, and thus, as Smith says of Kierkegaard, “decision or choice covers as great an area as thought itself” (80).

Smith’s narrative places Deleuze at the crossroads of these philosophical projects. But while Deleuze takes an interest in precisely the same question that motivates these projects – that is, how thought can think at the level of existence itself – Deleuze’s answer will be very different, an answer which shapes the entire project of Difference and Repetition: namely, that principles of identity, contradiction, and excluded middle all share the basic assumption that difference is derivative of, and therefore reducible to, identity. And so what we need, as Deleuze argues, is a form of thought that does not impose its own principles on existence (identity), but rather discovers the principle within the richness and multiplicity of existence itself (a principle of difference).

One of Smith’s earliest published works, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,” further develops the problem of experiential novelty by focusing on the nature of real sensation, arguing that Deleuze’s theory of sensation is an attempt to surpass the intractable dualism of aesthetics inherited in the wake of Kant: aesthetics as the form of sensibility of possible experience and aesthetics as the theory of art as reflection on real experience.9 By distinguishing between real and possible experience, Deleuze endeavors to show that the genetic elements of real sensation intersect with the creative process of artistic expression, such that art becomes much more than the mere representation of experience, but is in fact a mode of creating the affects that can both generate particular experiences and challenge received understandings of experience (“art as experience,” as the great John Dewey would say). First, Smith undertakes an analysis of Deleuze’s often obscure theory of “signs,” which for Deleuze are not objects of recognition (in the Kantian sense) but objects of an encounter, that is, the bearer of a problem that forces thought to think that which can only be sensed.10 Deleuze will argue that works of art are themselves explorations of these “problematizing” elements in sensation. Far from producing recognizable objects, true works of art aim at producing a “pure being of sensation,” i.e., a sign that provokes a problem in thought.11 Therefore, as Smith argues, “the genetic principles of sensation are thus at the same time the principles of composition of the work of art; and conversely, it is the structure of the work of art that reveals these conditions” (98). In this way, Smith provides further insight into both the historical trajectory of Deleuze’s theory of sensation as a solution to the dualism inherent in Kant’s aesthetic, as well as the ways in which the nature of sensation can be problematized from a Deleuzian point of view.

In a Nietzschean spirit, “The Place of Ethics in Deleuze’s Philosophy: Three Questions of Immanence” argues that Deleuze’s ethical

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task aims to purge ethics from all appeals to transcendent concepts, that is, concepts such as “the Good,” “the virtuous life,” or “the moral law” that judge the moral worth of actions based on external criteria (“morality” in the Nietzschean sense). By contrast, an ethics of immanence evaluates thought and action in accordance with “the immanent mode of existence” implied in the act (147). What is the mode of existence that serves as the principle of this or that action? As Deleuze observes, it was in fact Kant who first paved the way for the immanent critique of morality, since Kant reversed the traditional relationship between the Good and the law: It is not the transcendent Good that serves to determine moral principles and laws, it is rather the fact of the moral law that serves as a test, a tool for evaluation from which we determine what is good. On Deleuze’s reading, this move represents the third great Kantian reversal in philosophy: It is the law that precedes the good, and not vice versa.12 Yet at the very moment he prepares it, Kant fails to push the immanent critique of morality to its ultimate conclusion. Indeed, Kant reintroduces moral transcendence in two ways: First, the moral law becomes the “fact” of morality, the transcendent universalizability criteria by which all actions are judged (the first formulation of the categorical imperative). Second, the postulates of pure reason (God, the soul, the cosmos), which in the first Critique Kant so carefully dismantled as illusions of pure reason from the speculative point of view, are resurrected in the context of practical reason as postulates of moral fulfillment. Through a subtle fusion of Spinoza and Nietzsche, Smith argues, Deleuze will develop the full implications of an immanent critique of morality by reformulating the problem of ethics at the intersection of three questions: (1) How is a mode of existence determined? (2) How are modes of existence to be evaluated? (3) What are the conditions for the creation of new modes of existence? Finally, it is argued that far from any subjectivistic or relativistic ethics – which is often lamented in the absence of transcendent and universal standards of moral judgment – Deleuze turns to concepts of power and affect as purely immanent criteria of ethical evaluation (147-‐‑48).

Also present in this volume is one important new essay which develops a reading of Deleuze’s “Analytic of Concepts,” entitled “On the Becoming of Concepts.” Among the longest papers in the collection, this essay shines against the backdrop of the previously published and more established essays in the volume. One thread of this particular essay that I would like to examine a bit more in-‐‑depth is Smith’s process oriented thesis that Deleuze’s theory of concepts aims “to introduce the pure form of time into concepts, in the form of what he calls ‘continuous variation’ or ‘pure variability’” (130). With this thesis, Smith takes the reader through a brief but detailed discussion of Deleuze’s philosophy of time, a subject that was heretofore only minimally explored in Smith’s own published work. On Deleuze’s reading, time takes on a completely new structure in the philosophy of Kant, who liberates time from its classical determination as the measure of movement. With Deleuze, Smith observes that from antiquity

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to the seventeenth century, time was conceived as subordinate to movement as the basis for its intelligibility. In Plato’s Timaeus, for example, time is presented as the image of eternity, the latter conceived as the unchanging, the permanent (time as “a moving image of eternity”13). In Aristotle’s Physics, we find time famously defined as the “number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after.’”14 And in Plotinus, “a hierarchization of movements depending on their proximity or distance from the eternal” exhibits a similar image of time as subordinate to movement, namely, that it is in time that mere images of the true reside, while the truth in itself remains timeless and unchanging, unsubordinated to the temporal movements that characterize the sensible world (131).

It wasn’t until Kant that time achieved an autonomy of its own as a condition for the possibility of knowledge as such – thereby effecting the famous Kantian redistribution of the traditional objects of metaphysics (God, the immortal soul, the cosmos) as transcendent illusions internal to the interests of pure reason. Knowledge, the good, the experience of beauty, or ideas of the just society all become particular relationships within time, rather than images or models of the eternal or unchanging. Indeed, there is an important sense in which this first great Kantian reversal provides the foundation for all of Kant’s critiques and subsequent doctrines.15 As Smith observes, Deleuze is very clear on our debt to Kant for opening the first real passage into the possibility of conceiving an empty form of time, that is, a conception of time that is not dependent on movement, but rather becomes a pure and immutable form of everything that does move and change: as Deleuze ponders, “not an eternal form, but precisely the form of what is not eternal, the immutable form of change and movement.”16 Indeed, it becomes clear that a profound mystery of time is disclosed in Kant’s liberation, one that treats of time as both absolute and variable. This mystery is due in part to the fact that, as Smith says with Deleuze, the immutable and unchanging form of time cannot even be described as “permanent,” “since what is permanent – no less than what is successive or simultaneous – appears and is perceived in time, whereas the immutable form of time itself cannot be perceived” (133).

As the pure form of change, then, it is the absolute variability of time that will mark a decisive feature of Deleuze’s theory of concepts. But here Deleuze must break with the Kantian analytic of concepts, even if it was Kant’s own liberation of time that opened up the possibility of a theory of concepts as fractured by time. This is because, according to Smith, the Kantian synthesis only leaves us with a properly active synthesis that ultimately aims at recognition in the concept. Of course, this relationship between Kant and Deleuze regarding the nature of the syntheses is very complex, so I will only be able to address it in summary fashion.17

Famously, in the first Critique Kant had argued that if genuine cognition is to be possible yet also temporal, it must be brought to bear on the modes of time by fixing the multiplicity of temporal appearances in a

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linear and mutually reinforcing succession of past, present, and future. Therefore, in order for knowledge to be possible, I must (1) synthesize the multiplicity of presentations in an apprehension (present); (2) I must reproduce what has come before by synthesizing them with what is now present (past); and (3) I must synthesize the apprehended present and the previous presents with the presents that are to come, that is, I must be able to recognize what is to come through a concept in an act of recognition. Only under these conditions can I come to know the object before me. Kant further describes this movement as (1) the synopsis of the manifold through sense, (2) the synthesis of the manifold through imagination, and (3) the unity of this synthesis through original apperception (A94). However, it is only in the ‘B’ edition of the first Critique that Kant argues that all combination of the manifold (Mannigfaltigkeit) is an activity of the understanding (the power of concepts), and hence belongs to recognition.18 As has been argued, in the ‘A’ edition Kant, if only implicitly, leaves open the possibility of a synthesis brought about passively or unconsciously, as prior to the self-‐‑activity of the spontaneous understanding.19 This is because in the ‘A’ edition the recognition of the manifold through a concept does not appear until the third synthesis, which leaves the first two syntheses (apprehension and reproduction) outside the strictly determinate legislation of the concepts of the understanding.

As Smith argues, Deleuze in his own way modifies the Kantian analysis in this very direction by developing the movement of passive syntheses that are not governed by the rules of the active understanding. More profoundly than any simple break with the Kantian position, Deleuze performs this modification with the aim of rather completing and thereby revamping the Kantian transcendental project, in order to render possible the very moments which Kant himself presupposes: First, if Kant presupposes the receptivity of intuition, Deleuze’s modification makes it possible by reformulating the first synthesis (of apprehension, the present) into a passive organic and corporeal synthesis of habit; second, if Kant presupposes the very passage of time itself, Deleuze’s modification of the second synthesis (of reproduction, the past), following Bergson, makes it possible by positing the pure past without which the passage of time itself remains impossible. Finally, one of the more crucial differences between Kant and Deleuze obtains in the third synthesis (of recognition, the future), which is indeed one of Deleuze’s most interesting contributions to the philosophy of time. “The third synthesis,” Smith observes, “rather than appealing to recognition, instead is the condition for the production of the new” (134). But how does Deleuze’s third passive synthesis condition the production of the new?

In his essay, Smith leaves this question on the table, and so I would like to suggest an answer, if only in brief. In keeping with the Kantian parallel, if recognition – the aim of Kant’s third synthesis – is essentially rule governed, that is, governed by the legislation of the understanding, then

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Deleuze’s third synthesis surely cannot issue in a recognition, since for Deleuze the primary issue in fact concerns the very applicability (quid juris) of rules to real experience, that is, the very possibility of real experience issuing in an essential transgression of determinate rules (as Foucault would perhaps say). Following Deleuze, as Smith observes elsewhere citing the influence of Maimon, the demands of a genetic method require “the distinction between the conditions of possible experience and the conditions of real experience” (73). Of course, for his part Kant’s whole argument in the first Critique is that the a priori categories are necessarily applicable to every possible object of experience, and so it is in fact Kant’s conception of possible experience that is itself derived from the categories. It is precisely for this reason that such determinate categories are absent in Deleuze, and so Deleuze’s third passive synthesis cannot produce a recognition.

Therefore, rather than an original apperception that grounds a recognition, which would ensure the closure of time onto a determinate and mutually reinforcing succession, we witness in Deleuze a veritable opening of time into the future – but of course not a future determined by a relation between a determinate past and a determinate present; it is rather a pure future. Deleuze’s own great reversal here is that the third synthesis enacts a violence upon the passive (“larval,” i.e., processual) subject, forcing it to awaken a dormant faculty of thought in itself – thereby, as Deleuze says, “engendering the act of thinking within thought itself.”20 Rather than a critical idealism, then, we find in Deleuze’s more properly critical realism the notion that thought is primarily not something carried out by the mind, but is rather, following similar language as Deleuze’s rather gnomic definition of passive synthesis,21 something that occurs in the mind, not determined by either memory or reflection, and quite far from the order of categorical determination. In short, thought is something that happens to the mind before it is something actively carried out by the mind, conditioned by a violence delivered by the indeterminacy of the pure future.

Therefore, returning to Smith’s claim, Deleuze’s third passive synthesis forms a genuine condition for the production of the new, since there, as Deleuze writes, “[t]ime loses its circular shape in order to assume a merciless and straight form,”22 in which the future performs a continuous displacement of the present (habit formation) and the past (memory formation), thereby forcing the real passage of time. The influence of the Kantian reversal should be very clear: If Kant liberated time from its circular form, i.e., as the image of the eternal, then time must assume a linear form of movement that pushes into the indeterminacy of the future, which serves as both a necessary condition for the genuine movement of time, as well as the sufficient reason for the production of novelty in real experience.

Having thus explored the Deleuzian structure of time, which frames the analytic of concepts, Smith then guides the reader through the complex labyrinth that is the Deleuzian concept: a robustly temporal, and therefore, differential synthetic construct which, while lacking an identity in

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the strong substantial sense, nevertheless maintains a more fluid consistency that finds a complement in an internal variability. As such, the Deleuzian concept, it is argued, fulfills the critical injunction which forms the basis of Deleuze’s overall philosophical project, namely, to properly conceive the conditions for the genesis of the act of thinking as primarily creative in nature, that is, thinking thought itself from the point of view of the conditions of the new, the singular, or the unique – in short, real experience conditioned by pure difference.

The remaining essays of the volume treat their respective matters with a similar clarity of presentation. Indeed, throughout these essays Smith exhibits an uncanny knack for rendering intuitive some of the most obscure and vexing concepts and theses in Deleuze, to a point where the reader, upon receiving the instruction, is left wondering how the former confusion could have arisen (“ah, yes, of course that’s what Deleuze and Guattari understand by flow”). Finally, to conclude, while most of these essays have appeared elsewhere before – though many of the essays have been expanded beyond their original content, updated to reference additional literature, and enriched by the addition of numerous footnotes and references – Essays on Deleuze clearly marks an important landmark in the study of Deleuze’s philosophy, culminating a 15-‐‑year period of Smith’s unique and highly influential readings of Deleuze. It is no exaggeration to cite the wealth of material presented here, ranging from the explication of Deleuze’s key concepts, the situating of Deleuze within the broader story of Western philosophy both historically and presently, and the mapping of future trajectories that would carry forth Deleuze’s philosophical legacy – all of which are present in spades.

1 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and

Michael Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

2 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W.

Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).

3 Gilles Deleuze, “The Idea of Genesis in Kant’s Aesthetics,” trans. Daniel

W. Smith, Angelaki 5, no. 3 (2000).

4 It should be noted that while not everything of Smith’s work is included

in this volume, many of the themes of the omitted essays are nevertheless

explored in the essays collected in this volume. Notable omissions include

“‘Knowledge of Pure Events’: A Note on Deleuze’s Analytic of Concepts,

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which appears in Ereignis auf Französisch: Von Bergson bis Deleuze

(München: Fink Verlag, 2004); “From the Surface to the Depths: On the

Transition of Logic of Sense to Anti-Oedipus,” which appears in Gilles

Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction (New York: Continuum, 2009); finally,

“Deleuze’s Concept of the Virtual and the Critique of the Possible,”

published in Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry 4, no. 9

(2009).

5 In his seminal Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M.

Harding (New York: Cambridge Press, 1980), Vincent Descombes is perhaps

the first commentator in English to suggest that “Gilles Deleuze is above

all a post-Kantian” (152-167).

6 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1994).

7 Of course, Deleuze will remain open to the possibility of thinking the

nature of Ideas as “essences,” provided the conception is qualified in the

manner suggested here: “The events and singularities of the Idea do not

allow any positing of an essence as ‘what the thing is.’ No doubt, if one

insists, the word ‘essence’ might be preserved, but only on condition of

saying that the essence is precisely the accident, the event, the sense; not

simply the contrary of what is ordinarily called the essence but the

contrary of the contrary: multiplicity is no more appearance than essence,

no more multiple than one” (Difference and Repetition, 191).

8 One of the more clearly presented examples of this process can be found

in Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). In a manner similar to

Leibniz, Deleuze borrows the differential relation from calculus as a model

with which we can analogously conceive the processes of emergent novelty

in real experience: “[A] conscious perception is produced when at least

two heterogeneous parts enter into a differential relation that determines

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a singularity.... For example, the color green: yellow and blue can surely

be perceived, but if their perception vanishes by dint of progressive

diminution, they enter into a differential relation....that determines

green. And nothing prevents either yellow or blue, each on its own

account, from being already determined by the differential relation of two

colors that we cannot detect” (The Fold, 88).

9 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Charles Stivale and Mark

Lester, ed. Constantin Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press,

1990), 260.

10 A clear example that Deleuze references is found in Plato’s Republic,

specifically Socrates’ discussion of the “summoners” of thought

(Difference and Repetition, 138, 141). See Plato, Republic, 523c.

11 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 167.

12 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 32-33.

13 Plato, Complete Works, 37d.

14 Aristotle, Physics, 219b2.

15 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 27.

16 Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, 29.

17 For a more detailed account, see Joe Hughes’ excellent Deleuze and the

Genesis of Representation (New York: Continuum, 2008). Hughes also

discusses this more concisely in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A

Reader’s Guide (New York: Continuum, 2009), 88-96.

18 In fact, Kant seems to revoke the very possibility of a passive synthesis

in the ‘B’ edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1998). He writes: “All combination,

whether we are conscious of it or not, whether it is a combination of the

manifold of intuition or of several concepts, and in the first case either of

sensible or non-sensible intuition, is an action of the understanding, which

we would designate with the general title synthesis” (B130).

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19 In his lectures on genetic phenomenology, published in English as

Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony J.

Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), Husserl makes this claim of Kant.

Witnessing a crucial lacuna in the Kantian critique, Husserl’s

phenomenological reconstruction of transcendental aesthetics furnishes

profound insights into the rich domain of passive synthesis, a concept

which for Kant becomes a contradiction of terms given the explicit

formulation of all synthesis as conceptually governed on the opening page

of the ‘B’ deduction. Husserl suggests that Kant mistakenly rejected the

elements of passive synthesis as merely psychological in nature.




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